Blizzard's Diablo III On Linux?

In a recent gaming interview, Blizzard's director of the forthcoming Diablo III game was asked about a Linux client.

Diablo III is set to be released this month as the latest in the Diablo series of dark fantasy action role-playing games. Diablo III is being powered by an in-house Blizzard engine and will have native support for Microsoft Windows and Mac OS X.

In an interview with Jay Wilson, the Diablo III director, Aus gamers asked him about the possibility of a Linux client. Valve's Steam/Source on Linux was also cited.

AusGamers: One of the... I don’t want to use the word competitor, but one of the other larger PC teams out there, Valve and Steam, has recently announced that a bunch of their games are going to be available on Linux finally. Have you guys... is that something you’ve even thought about? Because I know there are variable levels of Linux and it’s quite complicated to take an established product and port it over to the varying levels of that OS. Is that something on the cards? Is it something you’ve ever thought about? Or is it strictly a “You know what? We’re just going to stick with the platforms we’ve got”?

Jay: You know, what’s interesting about making decisions like that is that they’re generally not ones that I make. Whether we support something like that or not, really kind of comes out almost more from our Birmingham team a lot of the times. Like if it was something that they saw a lot of demand out in the community, they would just come up and say “hey, we think we can support Linux” or something like that.

I haven’t had any particular conversations about that. I know we actually have a lot of stuff that we... like a lot of our server stuff actually uses Linux, so I don’t think that it would be outrageous, but I think that we’d have to see that there’d be a demand for it. And then we’d have to see that that demand would be worth the time we take away from the other things that we could do.

One of the things that... I know we’re Blizzard, so people kind of think we can do anything, but the truth is, we’ve got limited resources just level everybody else, it’s just... our plate’s just a little bigger.

So it’s like, well if we had the choice between getting PvP out earlier, or doing a Linux version, well PvP comes out earlier. That’s always what kind of ends up happening. Whenever anybody ever asks us “well why didn’t you do this thing?”, it’s, like, “well because we did this other awesome thing that we thought was more important”.

Michael Larabel is the principal author of Phoronix.com and founded the web-site in 2004 with a focus on enriching the Linux hardware experience and being the largest web-site devoted to Linux hardware reviews, particularly for products relevant to Linux gamers and enthusiasts but also commonly reviewing servers/workstations and embedded Linux devices. Michael has written more than 10,000 articles covering the state of Linux hardware support, Linux performance, graphics hardware drivers, and other topics. Michael is also the lead developer of the Phoronix Test Suite, Phoromatic, and OpenBenchmarking.org automated testing software. He can be followed via Twitter and Google+ or contacted via MichaelLarabel.com.